EMCC: Global Health

The Engineering & Management Commercialization Collaboration (EMCC) offers MBA students from the School of Management and bio-medical engineering students from the College of Engineering the opportunity to work collaboratively on a commercialization strategy for a medical device aimed for use in resource-limited settings. This project aims to give students the experience of working on a global health project with real-worldimplications and to build their experience in developing sustainable business strategies in a tangible global setting.

Device details—PharmaCheck

With counterfeit medicines occupying 10-30% of the market in resource-limited areas, millions of people receive inadequate treatment for illnesses. Current methods for screening substandard drugs require trained technical personnel, need to be housed in fully functional labs, and expensive. These attributes make these devices ineligible for use in resource-limited settings. Most importantly, none of these devices test the drug release kinetics, which is very important to conduct.

In response, PharmaCheck, is an inexpensive, reliable, and robust drug screening technology, and serves as an accurate quantitative measure of the active ingredient present. It also performs dissolution testing. It is designed to work in remote settings as a point-of-care technology with minimal training. It is based on a microfluidics platform, which is a cheap, robust, high throughput technology that has demonstrated resilience under harsh environmental factors.

Project details

The goal is to develop a sustainable, well-thought out commercialization plan to ultimately take the device to market and that actively engages stakeholders and end-users in that process